When Children Break the Rules, Highlight the Consequences for Others.
When my four-year-old daughter is misbehaving (and a boy , isn’t she), I have about 3.7 seconds to go through the list of possible parenting responses in my brain and select one of them.
There is the old standby mode – disabling behavior by any means possible and adding the phrase “Because I said so” if they dare to raise questions. But it turns out that using this approach exclusively is not very good in the long run , as children (and later adults) can be obedient but fearful, with resentment that manifests itself destructively.
Instead, I usually prefer to apply the rule and then offer an explanation of why she should stop sleeping with her collection of rocks / running around the aisle with cereals / feeding blueberries to Snuggabear. According to psychologists, this is a good tactic: Giving children context gives them the tools to build their own moral code .
But does it really change behavior?
It depends on how we formulate it, according to Adam Grant’s entertaining, dog-ear-worthy chapter of The Originals: How Nonconformists Move the World . Grant, an organizational psychologist and professor at Wharton, suggests from a series of studies that simply explaining how rules affect an individual child may not be enough to get them to act positively.
Instead, use discipline to emphasize the consequences for others.
Grant points to the groundbreaking research by Samuel and Pearl Oliner, who compared the childhood experiences of non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust with their neighbors who … did not. What was different? Parenting styles. Wow shit.
From the originals :
When the Oliners examined the recommendations of the parents of Holocaust rescuers, they found that they tended to provide “explanations for why the behavior is inappropriate, often citing its consequences for others.” While the parents of the witnesses focused on enforcing the rules for their own sake, the parents of the rescuers urged their children to consider the impact of their actions on others.
Highlighting the consequences for others draws attention to the suffering of the person who may be harmed by the person’s behavior, creating empathy for the person. It also helps children understand the role their own actions played in causing harm, leading to feelings of guilt. As Emma Bombek put it, “Guilt is a gift that continues to bring.” The dual moral emotions of empathy and guilt activate the desire to correct past mistakes and to behave better in the future.
When people are told that certain behaviors have personal consequences, they rationalize them. For kids, it might look something like this:
Parent: “Stop climbing the hill. When the child falls, you will be kicked in the face.
What the child thinks: “Well, I’ve done this 27 times before and survived unscathed, so yeah, I’m pretty confident in my current actions.”
But when the consequences for others are included (“Stop climbing the hill. You don’t let your friend slip down and she is sad”), a magical combination of empathy / guilt is triggered.
Emphasizing the consequences for others is a powerful motivator for adults as well. Grant and his colleague David Hofmann conducted an experiment: they went to the hospital and hung two different signs in places where doctors and nurses wash their hands.
All they changed was one word.
When doctors and nurses were reminded of how their actions would affect patients, they washed their hands 10 percent more often and used 45 percent more soap and gel.
The other day I decided to try to highlight the implications for others with my four year old. As we stood in line to order cheeseburgers, she began swinging the line separator. Normally I would say something like, “Stop – this will come crashing down on you and you will suffer,” but instead I said, “Stop – this could tip over and harm another person.”
She stopped and I swear I could almost see the little gears spinning in her head. She fell sharply, calmly approached me and began to swing on my leg.